Beau Brummell and His Heirs

By

Laura Jacobs

May 15, 2013 5:33 p.m. ET

Providence, R.I.

One doesn't come across the word "dandiacal" very often, but it's in the air at the Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design's elegant new exhibition, "Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion." An adjective that means "relating to or characteristic of a dandy," dandiacal rhymes with maniacal, which adds to the strong sensation that extreme or unruly impulses have been channeled into the dandy's meticulous attention to detail.

We know a dandy when we see one. Three-piece or double-breasted suit of ineffable, enviable fit, often in rainbow-trippy tweeds, tattersalls and velvets. Pristine collar, tie and pocket square. Vivacious socks. Shoes pampered and polished. A boutonniere, hat, walking stick—or all three—as grace notes. The dandy has the disciplined vigor of a Bach fugue, the ebullience of a male warbler in spring plumage. There is no female equivalent to this virtuoso of the three-way mirror, perhaps because a dandy's display takes place within the narrow paradigm of men's attire—shirt, pants, jacket—a silhouette hardly touched by fashion trends. Dandiacal energy, this exhibition argues, is more often an expression of nonconformism, romanticism, self-invention and idealism—not to mention the aesthete's unrelenting life of the eye—than it is an act of vanity.

The RISD show commences by introducing the founding father of dandyism, George Bryan "Beau" Brummell (1778-1840). It's unusual for a tribe or breed to have such a definitive beginning, but all agree that Brummell was It. This Englishman of middle-class birth climbed into Regency-era aristocratic circles based on no more than his verbal wit and the eloquence of his dress. He quickly became the last word on fashion, so much so that the Prince of Wales (George IV, crowned king in 1820) followed his sartorial lead. Surprisingly, Brummell's style was not flamboyant at all, or rather, it was flamboyantly restrained and impeccable.

A life-size reproduction of Robert Dighton's 1805 "Portrait of Beau Brummell"—the only surviving image of the man—stands at the entrance to the first gallery. He wears lean fawn breeches and a dark, double-breasted tailcoat with a deeply rounded neckline, the better to show off his signature high white collar and white cravat, immaculate as a sacrament. Fawn gloves, black top hat, Hessian boots and a riding crop finish this ensemble, show-stopping because of its body-conscious tailoring and complete renunciation of embellishment.

Few clothes from this era remain and none belonging to Brummell, but curators Kate Irvin and Laurie Anne Brewer have found period pieces—a tailcoat, pantaloons and greatcoat—that speak to Dighton's portrait. One sees how fitted these garments were, and how the yokelike collars, when filled with white linen, created a dramatic, even heroic, frame for the chest and face, a masculine equivalent to the cameo poitrine of females.

Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion

Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design Through Aug. 18

Further into the entrance gallery, prints and ephemera illustrate society's response to its newborn dandies: mockery and moralizing. Early dandies, denizens of the leisure class, spent buckets on personal style, investing hours to achieve an effect of spotless nonchalance. Carried away, they competed for highest collar, most corseted waist. The public came up with new names for these "poets of cloth." Fops. Exquisites. Robert Cruikshank's 1818 etching "A Dandy Fainting" caricatures a roomful of corseted young gents, presenting them as boneless alien forms akin to Aesop's grasshoppers, playing all day while the ants work. By the end of the century, however, the dandy was emerging as something more. Drawings of James McNeill Whistler,Charles Baudelaire and Max Beerbohm, followed by 20th-century photographs of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Andy Warhol, make the case for dandyism as an aesthetic stance, the domain of artists.

"Artist/Rebel/Dandy" comes alive in the second gallery, where the suits and ensembles of legendary and lesser-known dandies from all continents are grouped according to their owner's particular path into the brotherhood. Romantics, Revolutionaries, Historians, Explorers, Connoisseurs—every section contains gems. The 1933 suit of white tie and tails belonging to Fred Astaire, so spruce, is backed by a clip of him dancing in a similar tux in "Top Hat." The red tartan lounge suit worn by both King George V and his son Edward VIII—the royal who abandoned the throne—contains a sad history of destiny interwoven with disappointment. A gray flannel suit belonging to Truman Capote is small, serious and strangely naive, while Tom Wolfe's iconic white wool three-piecer, with matching cashmere cape, is grandiloquent—Rhett Butler meets "The Great Gatsby."

A section called "Relics" will prove irresistible to many viewers. Two snowy custom dress shirts lie side by side, one belonging to Mark Twain and the other to Oscar Wilde (saved from oblivion because it was at the laundry when he died). Just feet away, Warhol's white wig and white button-downs from Brooks Brothers, neck size 16½, form a postmodern, ready-to-wear echo of the bespoke tailoring of yore.

Singular among the clothes in the show is a superbly cut black wool coat and trouser suit of 1928, made for Michael Strange, which was the pseudonym of Blanche Oelrichs, a poet who was once married to the actor John Barrymore. This ensemble alone possesses a female quality of . . . prettiness. It's the exception that proves the rule: Dandyism is not effeminacy.

Where Strange's suit is lyric-subversive, Sebastian Horsley's extravagant red velvet suit and matching top hat is subversion as satire, Lewis Carroll's Wonderland by way of Mephistopheles. Horsley never had a chance to wear the red velvet in public. In 2010, on the night his memoir, "Dandy in the Underworld," had its West End premiere as a play, he died of a drug overdose. "Being a dandy is a condition," he once wrote. "It is a shield and a sword and a crown—all pulled out of the dressing up box in the attic of the imagination."

The first stirrings of this exhibition began with another death, in 2009—that of the revered RISD painting professor, artist and self-proclaimed "professional dandy," Richard Merkin. At the very center of the second gallery—at its heart, so to speak—a space titled "An Original" is devoted to Merkin's snazzy bespoke suits and custom shirts. "Dressing, like painting, should have a residual stability, plus punctuation and surprise," he said in 1986. "Somewhere—like in Krazy Kat—you've got to throw the brick." Dandiacal, indeed.

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